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Fünf Lieder, Op 40

Introduction

Schumann’s 26 Myrthen songs (Op 25) were written in February and March 1840. The cycle seems to have represented an unconscious attempt to mirror, in musical terms, the world view of literature espoused by his father who published editions of Italian, Spanish and English classics in German translations. It was as if the composer felt a need to make his music internationally valid by reaching out to the literature of other nations for his texts, the geographical scope of their origins a reflection of the breadth of his own culture and expressive aspirations. ‘I am no small-town composer’ Schumann (born in the small town of Zwickau) convincingly assures us (or so it seems), ‘I am a citizen of the world’. If song composition is an act of translation where a poem finds its musical analogue, the setting of a text that has originated in another language might be seen (and heard) as a double act of translation where translator and composer render the original poem a similar service. Schumann was both a composer and a master of German prose who spent much of his career writing about other people’s music; he was also an amateur poet. It is hardly surprising then that he also wished to serve literature and respected the act of translation as one writer’s homage to another. As a critic Schumann habitually encouraged his composers in a way which shows that this most humane of men desired to built bridges-in-words between musicians in a similar way – ‘Only connect’ indeed, and Schumann would have understood what E M Forster meant.

July 1840 was especially rich in songs. It is the month, above all, of Schumann’s settings of Adelbert von Chamisso. The famous Frauenliebe und -leben cycle was composed in this July, as well as six further songs which are not to be found in the first edition of that poet’s work (1831). The fourth edition of these best-selling poems dates from 1837 and it seems likely that this is the collection from which Schumann worked. As in the first edition, the Frauenliebe und -leben stands proudly at the head of Chamisso’s volume. But the poet enriches the later edition with evidence of his internationalist sympathies: an Icelandic saga, and an Idylle originally in the Tonga tongue (Chamisso had travelled in the South Seas and became a authority on the Polynesian languages) bring the collection to an close.

Less exotic perhaps, but of more interest to Schumann, were two further sets of translations in the 1837 edition of Chamisso – one of four French poems by Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780-1857), the other of four Danish poems by Hans Christian Andersen. In July 1840 Schumann set two of the first group of poems: Die Kartenlegerin (Hyperion Schumann Edition Volume 3) and Die rote Hanne. (One of the other Béranger items is The prophecy of Nostradamus concerning the year 2000 – as unsuitable for music as its predictions are inaccurate.)

In Geibel’s Gedichte the Andersen poems are printed immediately after the Béranger; they appear grouped under a subtitle – Nach dem Dänischen von Andersen (‘From the Danish of Andersen’). These are the poems which Schumann set as the first four songs of his Op 40. They are numbered 1 to 4 and the composer paid Chamisso the compliment of setting them all to music; moreover he adopted the translator’s order as if the German poet had created a work of art in its own right by arranging the four poems as an expressive sequence. But Schumann was not satisfied to finish the group with the madness of Der Spielmann. Love must win the day, and he searched through the Chamisso volume until he found something sufficiently upbeat. The fifth poem of Op 40, Verratene Liebe, is subtitled Neugriechisch – ‘modern Greek’– so this too is a translation. In fact Chamisso had taken it from a French source by Charles-Claude Fauriel.

The enormously prolific Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) was born in Copenhagen. He remains world-famous for his fairytales but he was author of almost every other genre – the German translation of the Werke appeared in 1847 and runs to fifty volumes – plays, novels, poems. travel books and autobiographies. He was born in poverty and gradually fought his way to recognition, drawing on the pain and rejections of his childhood for much of his work including the fairytales. When Schumann set these poems Andersen was only thirty-five years old and not yet the legend he was to become. How much the composer knew of the rest of the poet’s work in 1840 is not known, but Schumann was sufficiently in touch with the world of contemporary literature to know that Andersen was considered an up-and coming author.

The first personal connection between Andersen and Schumann occurred between the composition of the songs and their first appearance in print. In June 1841 the two narrowly missed each other in Leipzig when Andersen passed through that city. On this occasion the poet met Mendelssohn. During a concert visit to Copenhagen (March/April 1842) Clara met Andersen and it seems that Schumann was very pleased by the prospect of her meeting the poet. He had already formed an opinion of Andersen as an author: ‘Very wise, so clever, so child-like’ he wrote to Clara. She herself had decided that he was ‘frightfully vain and egotistic’ as well as ‘very ugly’, but she brought back a friendly letter for her husband from Andersen. The composer sketched a reply to Andersen telling him that he had read the novel Kun en Spillemand – ‘Only a Fiddler’. Since setting the four poems in Chamisso’s translations it seems that this extraordinary novel about Christian, an aspiring musician whose ambitions come to nought within an almost fairytale scenario influenced by Andersen’s own painful reminiscences, had been Schumann’s first experience of the Dane’s work.

The reason this reply was not sent was probably because the composer was waiting for the Op 40 songs to arrive from the printer. On 1 October 1842 he sent Andersen a copy of the songs (published by Kistner of Leipzig, and simultaneously in Denmark – because of the Danish connection of course – by the firm Lose & Olsen) which were dedicated to the poet. ‘Perhaps the settings will seem strange to you’ Schumann wrote, ‘ So at first did your poems to me. But as I grew to understand them better, my music took on a more unusual style’. Andersen replied in November mentioning that the composer Niels Gade had played through the music for him. At the same time he wrote to the Schumanns about his new novel Ahasverus inspired by the second part of Goethe’s Faust, no less. The highly-strung and self-absorbed Andersen was never shy about boasting about current successes and talking at length about future plans.

The composer and poet met for the first time in Leipzig on 22 June 1844. On this occasion Livia Frege (1818-1891), a soprano much admired by Schumann and Mendelssohn, was also invited. The Op 40 songs were performed, and according to Clara (who was surely the pianist) the poet received them ‘with seeming indifference’. In Andersen’s own mémoires he remembered the evening as being ‘poetic’ with only the composer and himself as audience. Clara’s charming presence, and that of Livia Frege, are not mentioned. (It was rumoured that Andersen had been unhappily in love with Jenny Lind, another friend of the Schumanns, but the poet was also certainly tormented by his homosexuality). In any case, lieder were small beer and he was openly ambitious. Andersen was more interested in interesting Schumann in a much larger project, and proposed his fairytale Die Glücksblume or Die Blume des Glücks, ‘The Flower of Happiness’, as the basis of an opera. Schumann was taken with the idea and the two men corresponded about it. The idea came to nothing, almost certainly because of the mental crisis which overtook the composer in the autumn of 1844. Schumann was aware of the difficulties of Andersen’s personality: a conversation with the Danish composer Gade in 1846 led him to write in his Tagebuch of the poet’s ‘childish vanity’ (it may have taken him some time to come to agree with Clara’s instant reaction) as well as Andersen’s inability, also like a child, to avoid the open expression of opinions that most people would suppress with good manners. In comparison with Dickens the Schumanns escaped lightly. The English novelist admired Andersen’s work and invited him to stay for a fortnight at Gad’s Hill Place in the summer of 1857. The Dane, a combination of Pecksniff and the Ugly Duckling, as Dickens later remarked, stayed five weeks and was counted by the Dickens children the most unbearable guest the family had ever entertained.

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Chamisso’s translation apparently does not do Andersen full justice. There is a concision and strangeness about the Danish original which shows why the poet was soon to be famous: a new manner in telling a story. Three of these Andersen poems have sinister under- or overtones which are easy to discern, but for this poem Chamisso produces something rather too Biedermeier in tone. And Schumann takes it literally, having been the first to admit that it had taken him some time to understand Andersen’s style. Like Heine, Andersen specialised in the parting shot, the punch line which takes the reader by surprise and produces a frisson of horror. The final line here is ‘Und Gott sei gnädig dem jungen Mann’ – a cheery blessing in this music. But the Danish words were surely charged with a warning of danger – suggestive of an eventual outcome such as poor Pip’s painful enslavement to Estella in Dickens’s Great Expectations. Mention of frost on the window-pane brings a shiver of recognition: memories of Andersen’s The Snow Queen and the mirror splinter which blights Kay’s vision and his love for Gerda.

Instead Schumann, without fantasising about a fairytale denouement, produces something of shy delight and delicacy. The flowers-as-eyes imagery brings to mind Schubert’s Des Müllers Blumen from Die schöne Müllerin. Tremulous delight is suggested by the syncopations – in the Vorspiel mezzo-staccato semiquavers in the right hand (underpinned by sighing legato left-hand quavers) edge towards the tonic key as if diffidently knocking at a door and opening it slightly more with each approach. All this is marvellous to describe peeking – screwing up the eyes gradually to focus on something on the other side of the window. The staccato touch suggests frost on the window-pane, a counterpoint to the airborne melody of the vocal line which is full of vernal sweetness.

The poem is in strophes of two-lines each. The musical shape is AB (where the two strophes constitute an ongoing melody) – C (as a middle section) – AB + 4-bar vocal coda and then a 4-bar piano coda. This means that the ‘C’ strophe, the third of the poem, is the pivotal point in the music: the melody changes direction and the accompaniment ceases to sing in the left hand and becomes breathless semiquavers almost panting between the hands. With the introduction of a romantic element – the two laughing eyes of the girl, the Augenpaar – the music is suffused with longing and a spark of eroticism. So far each word has been assigned to a single note, but the expressive melisma which ascends the stave on ‘Augenpaar’ speaks volumes for the expressiveness of the girl’s eyes. The immediate interaction of the two suitors is signified by the way the piano immediately answers that vocal melisma with one of its own, a little figuration that ornaments the dominant-seventh harmony and leads us back to a recapitulation of ‘AB’. The fourth strophe of the poem is then set to almost the same music that has been heard for strophes 1 and 2.

The fact that this song is about the birth of feeling between two people is beautifully caught by the musing, syncopated rapture of the two bars of piano writing immediately after the concluding ‘dem jungen Mann’; only we soon discover that this is not the end after all, and we should have realised this because the composer had not allowed the melody to return to the root position of the tonic. The final line of the poem, ‘Und Gott sei gnädig dem jungen Mann’, is repeated as if part of a pact, signed and sealed, like the ‘lived happily ever after’ catch phrase of a fairytale. And of course this returns the song to the home key of G major via an ordinary perfect cadence. This is not expressive enough for Schumann. Calling on his talents-in-abeyance as a composer for solo piano he briefly re-emerges from his reverie with a postlude marked ‘Etwas schneller, as if to emphasise that being in love bring with it an exuberance which borders on showing-off. Over a chromatically descending three-note figure in the bass a new love theme for the right-hand skips and gambols for two identical bars. Then, lest we forget that this encounter also has its poignant side, a heartfelt diminished-seventh harmony stretches upwards to another embellished cadence, immediately echoed by a falling semiquavers in contrary motion. This signals a teasing close – truly a final cadence this time, like someone quickly closing the piano lid. Flirtation on one hand and dumbstruck love on the other. It might be argued that, even if unintentionally, the composer has illustrated the poet’s belief that he who gives up his heart is likely to be burned by flame or frozen by ice. Despite loving moments of expressive sweetness in this music do we imagine that there seems to be someone laughing at the lover? If so, God help him indeed.

This song is closely related to Zwielicht from the Eichendorff Liederkreis Op 39, written two months earlier (May 1840). A mother’s dreams about her baby’s future can quickly turn into nightmares, and in the lowering twilight things can go terribly wrong: as Eichendorff writes at the end of Zwielicht ‘Manches geht in Nacht verloren / Hüte dich! Sei wach und munter’ (‘Many things can be lost in the night forever, so keep awake, be on your guard’). This may be read as a warning to parents as well as lovers, and in Muttertraum, like Wolf’s Mörike setting Auf ein altes Bild, the image of the baby under a mother’s protective gaze is projected far into the future as a grown man facing a solitary death. Mörike’s poem is a meditation on a painting of the infant Jesus on his mother’s lap; Andersen’s is a more modern image, but the scenario would fit one of the robbers crucified on either side of Christ and left to be eaten by the birds.

The musical response in both Zwielicht and Muttertraum is a spiral of descending sequences derived from a style that is simultaneously magisterial and compassionate – the ‘ancient’ style of Schumann’s beloved J S Bach. This music of the highest intellect is also, as Schumann himself remarked, deeply applicable to the romantics. The contrapuntal forms in which it is written, including fugue, suggest something cosmic or ‘written in the stars’, the pre-ordained destiny of those unfortunate as well as blessed. The sure knowledge that, come what may, night follows day, and the conviction that some are singled out by fate for heartbreak or misfortune, unites the themes of Zwielicht and Muttertraum as well as In der Nacht from the Spanisches Liederspiel. Another cosmic immutability is motherhood: the gently undulating figurations of Muttertraum suggest ‘the cradle ceaselessly rocking’ as Walt Whitman put it. Each of the three songs begins with the announcement of a theme as if played on a single manual; in all three songs strands of seemingly independent counter-melody, announced one at a time, are essential to the music’s neo-Baroque grandeur.

Muttertraum begins with falling, and then rising, semiquavers, built on modest arpeggios on the tonic and dominant (the key is D minor). On the second quaver of the second bar a new entry in the tenor register is heard in the left hand, a line written in out-of-step syncopation which lays the foundation for the unease which grows steadily throughout the song. (It is also this off-beat figure which later sways back and forth in the bass line and suggests the rocking of a cradle.) After four bars of introduction the voice enters (the music is now a three-part invention) and for a few moments this could be an aria from a Passion by one of Bach’s forgotten contemporaries. The opening words, describing a praying mother and her child, could refer to a blissful scene in any painted Adoration. A warning note is sounded in the text where angels are mentioned: the child is no angel, the poet tells us, though he seems to be one in his mother’s eyes. The seeds of something ominous are sown.

There are three strophes here. There is a new melody for every two lines of verse. The musical shape is AB – CD – AE. ‘AB’ begins and ends more or less in D minor moving through various keys in its chromatic unwinding. ‘CD’ is essentially a maggiore interlude (the tonal highlights here are F major and B flat major) which allows maternal joy to sweep aside misgivings about the future. The texture of the accompaniment becomes more complex and convoluted due to more energetic left-hand activity. This no longer simulates the simple oscillations of a cradle; one imagines the child picked up and cuddled and Schumann allows the melodic contour to suggest love and hope and even optimism. However, in that dislocated left-hand writing there is a nagging feeling that something is not ‘right’. The sinister mood of the opening is softened, but not for long.

The four-bar interlude is an exact repeat of the Vorspiel and then there is a musical repeat of the ‘A’ section. This leads us back to the black mood of the opening and this introduces a new character – the raven. (It is as if Andersen already knew Edgar Allan Poe’s poem where the bird also speaks, but that was first published in 1845). The chromatic weavings of the first verse suit the devious malevolence of these sinister birds. It is now that the repeat of the ‘A ’section is followed by ‘E’ – completely new material. As soon as the bird begins speaking (‘Dein Engel, dein Engel, wird unser sein’) the style temporarily abandons Bach and changes to that of a Schumann love song, or rather a deliberately grotesque parody of his ‘Du bist wie eine Blume’ style. The gently emollient harmonies throb in gentle semiquavers supported by crotchets deep in the bass – the ghastly prophecy delivered by a beak twisted into a smile, if that were ornithologically possible. The final line of the poem is repeated in a deep and croaking tessitura over a repetition of the introductory music, expanded and adapted into a coda.

Although this postlude is marked pianissimo, the left hand counter-melody signifies a terrible verdict handed down from on high with a finger pointing to the grave. As right-hand semiquavers swirl in patterns both menacing and Bachian, the left-hand music charts an inexorable descent, step by step, into perdition. This music explores reaches of the keyboard lower than those usually used by Schumann in his songs, and makes an eerie effect. Muttertraum thus ends with what seems a musical journey – the wanderings of a lost soul disappearing into the distance, shouldering a terrible destiny decided at birth. As such it perfectly mirrors that aspect of Andersen’s art which mixes the supernatural with searing social realism. The composer also chooses to close the song on a second inversion chord in D minor, both a musical question mark and a planned transition into the song which follows.

At least one poem from this set should be printed here in Andersen’s original Danish to give the reader some idea of the difference between this and Chamisso’s translations. This Soldaten (‘The Soldier’) was set to music very successfully by Grieg in 1865:

Even a cursory reading of a poem in language that one does not speak reveals a terseness and abrupt bitterness in the rhythm (particularly in the third and fourth lines of each strophe) which is not to be found in the more elegant Chamisso version. Andersen, a Scandinavian with all the dark repression of his background, is very different from the German humanist; he was as also a more pessimistic and ‘modern’ artist than his translator. But what Chamisso gave to Schumann is touching and heartfelt, and it inspired the composer to produce a love song unique in his output. When Chamisso writes ‘Ich hab’ in der Welt nur ihn geliebt’ (‘I have loved only him in all the world’) one could write off such a statement as nineteenth-century hyperbole, but the translator emphasises the point by the almost caressing repetition of ‘Nur ihn’ (‘only him’) in the following line (not in Andersen) and Schumann does not flinch from setting this whole passage in a way that is both distressing and tender, high in the voice and marked pianissimo as if in confession. The poem is not only about comradeship, but about the wages of sin; it surely reflects Andersen’s homosexuality in a context of the guilt, violence and death which are the nightmare co-habitants of the closet. This tale of the lover as executioner reminds us of Oscar Wilde’s ‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves’ (in The Ballad of Reading Gaol) and how much Wilde’s stories, such as The Nightingale and the Rose and The Selfish Giant, owe to Andersen’s example. The listener never discovers why the poor young soldier has been sentenced to death. One wonders whether the narrator who is summoned to take part in the execution may be guilty of the same ‘crime’ and is simply fortunate not to have been found out.

Muttertraum has ended on a second inversion of the D minor chord which is resolved or completed by the opening tonic chord of D minor in Der Soldat. As we have said we never discover of what crime the soldier stands convicted. Has Schumann imagined a fulfilment of the raven’s prophecy as if it is the soldier who is the robber – ‘der Räuber’ – whose corpse will be eaten by birds in Muttertraum? In any case, the enchainment of the two songs suggests that the composer had some sort of game of consequences in mind. It may be he simply envisaged the linking of two examples of Andersen’s gallows pathos. Schumann might also have thought of these two songs as a D minor diptych (a ‘death’ tonality ever since Schubert’s Der Tod und das Mädchen) on the gruesome subject of execution. Unfortunately this theory is spoiled by the fact that the next song, Der Spielmann, also has D minor as its original key, although it may be argued that the insanity depicted in that song is a form of living death.

The song-composer Robert Franz criticised Der Soldat for being merely ‘a picture of the execution’ rather than descriptive of the soldier’s sorrow. He could not have heard a fine enough performance. Of course the frightening mechanics of the ceremony are at the heart of the piece’s shattering effectiveness. This narrator is squeezed into a soldier’s uniform and he has to take part; he is placed within the execution and unable to escape it. He is propelled forward by the inexorable march rhythm, but his feelings are accurately captured, even if, in being press-ganged into the task, he has no time to ruminate in a more leisurely philosophical fashion.

The muffled drum of ceremonial murder (a curious but effective piano figuration in quintuplets an octave apart in both hands) is heard from the very beginning. It is a march for the dead before the execution – a depiction of ‘a dead man walking’ in American penitentiary slang. The end of each bar has a right-hand accent which is tied over to the beginning of the next – a stilted effect akin to a soldier’s boot juddering a few inches off the ground in the retarded step of the death march. At the end of the song’s fourth bar the voice makes its entrance and held in rigid check by the accompaniment which doubles it for much of the time; the singer is like a fainting solider kept in formation by the tight press of the bodies of his comrades on either side of him.

For the first two lines of the first strophe the tonality remains in D minor. With ‘O wär er zur Ruh’ und alles vorbei!’ the music slips into F major as if the narrator were attempting to absent himself from the scene with the greatest mental effort; he imagines the peace experienced by a soul at rest (during this change the accented rhythm of the march continues of course). However it is the next shift of tonality, this time into the submediant (B flat major) at ‘Ich hab’ in der Welt nur ihn geliebt’, as well as the height of the singer’s tessitura, which suffuses the music with the desperate nostalgic tenderness implicit in Chamisso’s use of the past tense. In this passage Schumann makes Schubertian use of the sadness of the major key. That these intimate words are not permitted to get slower or more contemplative in the context of the march emphasises the cruelty of this terrible predicament. The poem, like certain items in Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, concerns sexual ambivalence in an uncompromisingly masculine setting; Schumann’s Der Soldat and Butterworth’s Is my team ploughing? are two of several well-known songs in the repertoire which rise to such a challenge without embarrassment or comment. For this reason generations of singers and listeners have ignored the depth and complexity of the poets’ anguish; one English singing teacher’s reaction to a discussion of the Butterworth was that the lines ‘And has he found to sleep in / A better bed than mine?’ were too openly expressed to have dared to mean what they actually say.

The last line of the second verse (‘Dazu bin auch ich kommandiert’) signals one of the most exciting interludes in all Schumann’s lieder. Here is the composer writing in 1835: ‘The cortège begins to move; a march now wild and gloomy, then joyous and brilliant, accompanies it; there is a dull sound of footsteps, the murmuring noise of the crowd’. Thus Schumann described the ‘Marche au Supplice’ in a long critique of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. In the fourth movement of that great work the hero watches his own execution in an opium-induced dream. And in writing a march to the scaffold of his own it is impossible that Schumann should not have thought of Berlioz. This savage, almost exultant interlude has an almost symphonic breadth and it includes the suggestion of timpani and clashing cymbals; it moves through D minor to A major and then to G minor. This last shift into the subdominant suggests that the cortège has turned a corner and arrived at the place of execution.

Just before the beginning of the third strophe (‘Nun schaut er auf zum letzten Mal’) the falling sequential phrases of the interlude take another turn and set up a cadence into F major as the singer re-enters the fray. We hear that the condemned man is looking at the light of day for the last time, but the music tells us it is just as significant that the narrator is gazing at a beloved friend who is soon to die. A man about to be shot may cherish his last minutes of sunlight; but the music here has more than one tier. Once again a Schubertian use of the major key suggests a breaking heart which is powerless to express itself. The music continues in this vein as the blindfold is placed on the victim. And then comes an astonishing four-bar Zwischenspiel which literally explodes on the page.

The motifs of rolling drum and clashing cymbals here reach their climax. The sforzato octaves on the first beat of each bar descend in semitones while the last beat of each bar is also sforzato at the opposite end of the keyboard. There are nine successive sforzati as if Schumann imagines nine young executioners taking turns, each firing once, with the last (and only successful) shot on the resolving G minor chord which coincides with ‘Es haben die Neun wohl angelegt’. A German accompanist colleague averred that no group of German soldiers would ever miss their target in such a manner; but these are Danish soldiers of course, and press-ganged conscripts to boot.

In this interlude the succession of sudden switches from bass to treble is extremely violent; as well as being descriptive of the actual execution it also symbolises anger and revulsion. The heaving from bass to treble and back again could easily describe retching – so raw is this music that, were he not attempting to pull a trigger, the narrator might well be throwing up.

The final verse is somewhat hindered by the fact that it has to describe something that is already in the past. Suddenly we are in the world of what has happened, rather than what is happening. The march music is no longer appropriate and for six bars – a suspension of time while the narrator allows us to catch up with events – the composer substitutes striding left-hand octaves in dotted rhythm beneath pulsating triplets in the right. Then comes the typical Andersen punch line revealing that the narrator (‘Ich aber, ich’) was the only one to hit the mark. (Chamisso’s line ends with ‘ins Herz’ which is better scansion, but at this stage the composer feels he wants to highlight ‘in das Herz’ with two recitative-like quavers and a clinching minim delineating a bulls-eye). Apart from the use of a melodramatic piano tremolo, the closing bars of the song are strikingly similar to the end of the song Die beiden Grenadiere. If the means of execution is explosive, the manner of dying is not. In a four-bar Nachspiel the music slumps slowly to its end – a succession of bereft minim chords winding up with no fewer than four A major chords. This inconclusive and pathetic collapse on the reiterated dominant chord serves to depict the emotional devastation and emptiness in the wake of the execution.

This was not Schumann’s first experience of a death march. Die beiden Grenadiere belongs more or less to the same genre, as does the third song in the Der arme Peter trilogy (cApril 1840). The Andersen/Chamisso march of Der Soldat, certainly a high point of this kind of music, is unmatched until Gustav Mahler whose execution balladry is even more extravagantly morbid: the Knaben Wunderhorn settings Der Tambourg’sell and Revelge.

Once again the tonality is D minor (in its original key), the third of a triptych of D minor songs in Op 40. The end of Muttertraum and the beginning of Der Soldat are linked, and the final 6-4 chord of Der Soldat is only resolved in the fourth bar of the introduction to Der Spielmann.

Whatever Schumann’s reason for interleaving these Anderseniana, this song is one of Schumann’s most harrowing masterpieces. Only a few months before his marriage to Clara it was Schumann’s recurring nightmare that she would marry someone else; that he should be required to watch the ceremony was the additional twist of a Heine-inspired self-torturing fantasy (cf the wedding poems in the Lyrisches Intermezzo). He seems to have been drawn to this lyric by that self-identification which prompted some of the best settings in 1840 including Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen from Dichterliebe which is a variant of the same theme. That Der Spielmann has a nuptial twist is shown by the fact that its pervading melody is a minor-key version of the opening of Im Walde from the Liederkreis Op 39, another song which opens with a wedding.

It is in Der Spielmann, more than anywhere in the Andersen songs, that the composer’s own neuroses overlap with those of the poet. Andersen, renowned for his ugliness (this was also Clara’s first impression of him), always felt the outsider, excluded from all happiness and doomed to disappointment and rejection at every turn, not only on account of his looks but also because of his lowly birth. Photographs and portraits of his tall bony frame and long stringy hair are reminiscent of pictures of Paganini, the demonic virtuoso violinist who was a touch mad himself. Whenever I hear this song I imagine a composite picture of Andersen/Paganini sawing away at the violin.

This song requires recklessness for everybody concerned; it is full of the scraping of double-stopping at high speed, or at least the piano’s poor imitation of such gut-wrenching sounds. The marking is ‘Quasi presto’ and there is nothing else like this tempo in the Schumann lieder. Indeed this song in 3/4 has the fastest crotchet beat in the canon; chords and figurations echoing the vocal line shoot off in the right hand while the sprung rhythms in the left drive the scene relentlessly forward. Melismatic coloratura on words like ‘Jubels’ and ‘Tanz’ challenge the singer’s diaphragm, and the pianist’s hands are made to pounce on dotted minim chords at opposite ends of the keyboard as if attempting to trap a mouse on a dance floor. All is jangle and jitter and frazzle in a headlong dance fit for emotional lemmings.

The first verse describes the wedding, but this is not a happy occasion; if we had not already guessed from the helter-skelter of the music, we realise that something is amiss when we are told the bride is as pale as death. At first we assume that the narrator is simply a disinterested observer. In the second verse his tone changes, as does his tune. (The abrupt tonal ratcheting up and down as the pianist’s interludes effect the modulations between the strophes is one of the satisfyingly deranged details of this setting.) At ‘Ja tot für den, den nich sie vergißt’ there is more or less the same vocal melody we have heard in the first strophe but transposed a fifth lower. The effect of this change is wondrous: like gatecrashers at a wedding the audience is drawn into the narrator’s confidence by a low tessitura which promises secrets about the unknown bride and groom, all intoned in a hoarse whisper. From this sotto voce source we learn that the she is marrying the wrong man. What is more, the man she does love (or so we are told) is the jobbing musician who has been hired to play the violin. Every phrase of this imparted information is punctuated by the fiddler’s increasingly impassioned interjections.

For the third verse the spotlight is turned fully on the virtuoso interloper; the background musician has become a stour turn. At this point all rational explanation of his behaviour is abandoned in favour of a Hans Andersen fairytale where the violinist’s hair goes visibly grey in front of our eyes. (Some of the press comments about Paganini’s performances describe supernatural happenings in similar ways.) At the passage beginning ‘Er streichet die Geige’ the height of the vocal tessitura, as well as the speed of the music, produces a wildness which crosses the borders of description and becomes complete self-identification. This is the most eerie aspect of this song, and the most modern in psychological terms. The pianist has represented the fiddler until now, but suddenly the singer and the accompaniment begin to fuse into a single personification. This vocal outpouring is far too passionate to be merely a comment from the sidelines; this fiddle music has begun to inhabit the narrator and such close empathy with the violinist blurs the boundaries between observer and observed. The juddering quavers that have begun as vocal melisma in the first verse now appear in the twirling fingers of the pianist’s right hand: violin, piano and singer suffer as one, and all three are at breaking point.

At the beginning of the fourth verse (‘Es ist gar grausig, wenn einer so stirbt’) the forte of the previous lines changes abruptly into piano. These almost clinical observations are a final attempt at distancing the fate of the violinist from the narrator’s own. But this dissembling cannot last. With the hysterical outburst of ‘Ich mag und will nicht länger es sehn’ followed by the hushed ‘Das möchte den Kopf mir schwindelnd verdrehn’ the singer’s cover is finally blown: he is the violinist himself, and the fact that he has seemed to be standing outside himself watching his performance is proof of his madness. At ‘Wer heißt euch mit Fingern zeigen auf mich?’ the vocal line is marked ‘Wild’, the accompaniment ff. He is like a cornered beast; ‘Why look at me?’ he shouts. The interlude following this terrible outburst seems tongue-tied in the right hand, while the left shudders in spasms in dotted rhythm. Aggression alternates with pathos. All is lost.

For the next line of the poem (‘O Gott – bewahr uns gnädiglich’) the music is suddenly marked ‘Langsamer’ (slower). These sudden changes – loud to soft, fast to slower – indicate the mood-swings of mental illness (how well Richard Strauss understood this in his Ophelia settings from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but Schumann seems to have understood even better, as if at first hand). The last three lines of this poem are treated as a new section in the key of G major (in the song’s original key). Violence and vehemence are spent, although the new tempo marking (‘slower’ not ‘slow’) is no excuse for the half tempo Adagio which makes this song drag lugubriously to its conclusion in so many performances. The new tonality is bittersweet and disorientated, and the dance rhythm should still be discernible in the background although slower when distorted through the prism of the violinist’s nervous breakdown.

One might imagine the poor violinist – a gaga Geiger – being led away gently mumbling that it is just as well that he is not mad. And here, amidst all this switching and conflation of identities, a new voice can be heard: that of Robert Schumann himself who steps into the frame and elbows his fellow ‘Musikant’ to one side as if to offer his own personal plea for freedom from insanity. A section especially marked Adagio for the closing words is a clear case of the inverted commas of a composer’s special pleading, an almost talismanic utterance from a superstitious genius who feared that his career would end in mental breakdown. And so it sadly did.

The postlude to this song is an extraordinary creation of shadows and ghosts. Fragments and distant echoes of melody limp above left-hand rhythms which prophesy the twitches, stutters and speech distortions that characterised the composers last illness. As a final gesture the right hand stretches over the left with a little motif of three notes which slides to the depths of the keyboard, ending on a low G. After this symbolic descent into the abyss the only thing that remains is a distant echo of the wedding music, the remains of a tied G major 6-4 chord which is determinedly held for bar after bar in the bass clef, like the tenacious love of a stubborn madman. But even this must fade and be forgotten.

The tonal sequence of the five songs of Op 40 is G major, D minor, D minor, D minor (ending in G major), G major. An imposing central column of eerie or mad Andersen settings in Chamisso’s translations is decorated on each side by two much less substantial songs, both in the same cheery major key. The first of these, Märzveilchen, is also by Andersen. The last song in the opus, Verratene Liebe, is a Neugriechisch (‘modern Greek’) poem translated by Chamisso from a French version of the text by Charles-Claude Fauriel (1772-1844) which appeared in that writer’s Chants populaires de la Grèce in 1825.

From the literary point of view this may seem rather a messy construction of a set of songs, even if it is not a real cycle. It is certainly one which the purist Hugo Wolf would have avoided. Why not another Andersen song? The answer is that Chamisso had translated only these four poems by Andersen whose works appeared in a full German translation for the first time in 1847. Schumann needed a finale, another song which would lift the spirits after the harrowing Der Spielmann. There is a certain logic in that he found the answer in his volume of Chamisso (thus the translator unites all five songs), and a reading of Verratene Liebe shows that this winged-heeled chain of consequences with its speaking stars and gossiping seas might have been written by Andersen himself. The idea of a secret kiss becoming public knowledge in just this way is typical of the fanciful Danish poet, and Schumann knew it.

The musical ‘translation’ of the poem’s main conceit is masterful. The piano texture of the introductory two bars represents the shy secret (beautifully phrased, simple, heartfelt and intimate) but it grows little by little until it overflows the stave. The cell from which the whole song grows might have been written by Mozart, a V-I cadence as delicate as a kiss. The vocal line in initially unaccompanied, which fits the unadorned modesty of the exchange. Mention of the stars brings a staccato texture to the piano writing, pinpricks of light which dance through an accompaniment enlivened by fragments of tittering imitation. Yes, this kiss is now the subject of comment and soon the whole of nature will be aware of the news. This is the type of ‘Verrat’ (betrayal) that is nothing to do with war or espionage; we have heard the like in the Geibel setting Es ist verraten (track 5) where a girl attempts in vain to hide that she is in love.

The song is made up of four-bar phrases: Verse 1:A A; Verse 2: B B; Verse 3: A A (both phrases adapted to make a coda). This simple binary plan produces music with the pleasing inevitability of folksong. The second verse is slightly more harmonised and ‘worked’ than the first in terms of the accompaniment, but the third turns into a jubilant royal progress as the news is flashed through east and west to general acclaim. A lot of words go by very quickly, and a three-strophe poem turns into a song of less than two pages.

The postlude teems with life – these semiquavers, each with a syllable of delighted comment, do not represent Giebel’s ‘böse Zungen’ but rather tongues happy to rejoice in the birth of a new love affair. The news about Robert and Clara’s relationship must have similarly spread like wildfire through the German musical world. The ebullience of the piano writing – an outburst of virtuosity as if the whole of nature were turning cartwheels of joy – is as unexpected as it is successful. In a matter of moments a courtly little ditty has turned into a chortling paean, and that is its point. These confident little sequences trail the left-hand quavers which fall towards the bass and fly under the hands. All is laughter and defiance. Far from feeling betrayed, the singer is glad that the world knows. The postlude is reminiscent of the cheeky patterns that punctuate each verse of Niemand from Myrthen. The message is the same: ‘With what I’ve got I don’t give a damn what anyone else thinks.’ But lest we forget that all lovers need privacy the last three bars of the postlude are marked diminuendo, vanishing into thin air as right-hand semiquavers airily ascend the stave and slip out of sight.